UX Myths That Hurt SEO - Whiteboard&nbspFriday

The author's views are entirely his or her own (excluding the unlikely event of hypnosis) and may not always reflect the views of Moz.

User experience and SEO: friends or enemies? They've had a rocky past, but it's time we all realized that they live better in harmony. Dispelling the negative myths about how UX and SEO interact is the first step in improving both the look and search results of your website.

In today's Whiteboard Friday, Rand talks about some persistent UX myths that we should probably ignore.

Have anything to add that we didn't cover? Leave your thoughts in the comments below!

Video Transcription

"Howdy, SEOmoz fans, and welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. This week I wanted to talk a little about user experience, UX, and the impact that it has on SEO.
Now, the problem historically has been that these two worlds have had a lot of conflict, especially like late '90s, early 2000s, and that conflict has stayed a little bit longer than I think it should have. I believe the two are much more combined today. But there are a few things that many people, including those who invest in user experience, believe to be true about how people use the web and the problems that certain user experience, types of functionality, certain design types of things cause impact SEO, and they impact SEO negatively. So I want to dispel some of those myths and give you things that you can focus on and fix in your own websites and in your projects so that you can help not only your SEO, but also your UX.
So let's start with number one here. Which of these is better or worse? Let's say you've got a bunch of form fields that you need a user to fill out to complete some sort of a registration step. Maybe they need to register for a website. Maybe they're checking out of an e-commerce cart. Maybe they're signing up for an event. Maybe they're downloading something.
Whatever it is, is this better, putting all of the requests on one page so that they don't have to click through many steps? Or is it better to break them up into multiple steps? What research has generally shown and user experience testing has often shown is that a lot of the time, not all of the time certainly, but a lot of the time this multi-step process, perhaps unintuitively, is the better choice.
You can see this in a lot of e-commerce carts that do things very well. Having a single, simple, direct, one step thing that, oh yes, of course I can fill out my email address and give you a password. Then, oh yeah, sure I can enter my three preferences. Then, yes, I'll put in my credit card number. Those three things actually are more likely to carry users through a process because they're so simple and easy to do, rather than putting it all together on one page.
I think the psychology behind this is that this just feels very overwhelming, very daunting. It makes us sort of frustrated, like, "Oh, do I really have to go through that?"
I'm not saying you should immediately switch to one of these, but I would fight against this whole, "Oh, we're not capturing as many registrations. Our conversion rate is lower. Our SEO leads aren't coming in as well, because we have a multi-step process, and it should be single step." The real key is to usability test to get data and metrics on what works better and to choose the right path. Probably if you have something small, splitting it up into a bunch of steps doesn't matter as much. If you have something longer, this might actually get more users through your funnel.
Number two. Is it true that if we give people lots of choice, then they'll choose the best path for them, versus if we only give people a couple options that they might not go and take the action that they would have, had we given them those greater choices? One of my favorite examples from this, from the inbound marketing world, the SEO world, the sharing world, the social world is with social sharing buttons themselves. You'll see tons of websites, blogs, content sites, where they offer just an overwhelming quantity of tweet this, share this on Facebook, like this on Facebook, like us on Facebook, like our company page on Facebook, plus one this on Google+, follow us on Google+, embed this on your own webpage, link to this page, Pinterest this.
Okay. Yes, those are all social networks. Some of them may be indeed popular with many of your users. The question is: Are you overwhelming them and creating what psychologists have often called the "paradox of choice," which is that we as human beings, when we look at a long list of items and have to make a decision, we're often worse at making that decision than we would be if we looked at a smaller list of options? This is true whether it's a restaurant menu or shopping for shoes or crafting something on the Internet. Etsy has this problem constantly with an overwhelming mass of choice and people spending lots of time on the site, but then not choosing to buy something because of that paradox of choice.
What I would urge you to do is not necessarily to completely get rid of this, but maybe to alter your philosophy slightly to the three or four or if you want to be a little religious about it, even the one social network or item that you think is going to have the very most impact. You can test this and bear it out across the data of your users and say, "Hey, you know what? 80% of our users are on Facebook. That's the network where most of the people take the action even when we offer them this choice. Let's see if by slimming it down to just one option, Twitter or Facebook or just the two, we can get a lot more engagement and actions going." This is often the case. I've seen it many, many times.
Number three. Is it true that it's absolutely terrible to have a page like this that is kind of text only? It's just text and spacing, maybe some bullet points, and there are no images, no graphics, no visual elements. Or should we bias to, hey let's have a crappy stock photo of some guy holding up a box or of a team smiling with each other?
In my experience, and a lot of the tests that I've seen around UX and visual design stuff, this is actually a worse idea than just going with a basic text layout. If for some reason you can't break up your blog post, your piece of content, and you just don't have the right visuals for it, I'd urge you to break it up by having different sections, by having good typography and good visual design around your text, and I'd urge you to use headlines and sub-headlines. I wouldn't necessarily urge you to go out and find crappy stock photos, or if you're no good at creating graphics, to go and make a no good graphic. This bias has created a lot of content on the web that in my opinion is less credible, and I think some other folks have experienced that through testing. We've seen it a little bit with SEOmoz itself too.
Number four. Is it true that people never scroll, that all the content that you want anyone to see must be above the fold on a standard web page, no matter what device you think someone might be looking at it on? Is that absolutely critical?
The research reveals this is actually a complete myth. Research tells us that people do scroll, that over the past decade, people have been trained to scroll and scroll very frequently. So content that is below the fold can be equally accessible. For you SEO folks and you folks who are working on conversion rate optimization and lead tracking, all that kind of stuff, lead optimization, funnel optimization, this can be a huge relief because you can put fewer items with more space up at the top, create a better visual layout, and draw the eye down. You don't have to go ahead and throw all of the content and all of the elements that you need and sacrifice some of the items that you wanted to put on the page. You can just allow for that scroll. Visual design here is obviously still critically important, but don't get boxed into this myth that the only thing people see is the above the fold stuff.
Last one. This myth is one of the ones that hurts SEOs the most, and I see lots of times, especially when consultants and agencies, or designers, developers are fighting with people on an SEO team, on a marketing team about, "Hey, we are aiming for great UX, not great SEO." I strongly disagree with this premise. This is a false dichotomy. These two, in fact, I think are so tied and interrelated that you cannot separate them. The findability, the discover bility, the ability for a page to perform well in search engines, which remains the primary way that we find new information on the Internet, that is absolutely as critically important as it is to have that great user experience on the website itself and through the website's pages.
If you're not tying these two together, or if you're like this guy and you think this is a fight or a competition, you are almost certainly doing one of these two wrong. Oftentimes it's SEO, right? People believe, hey we have to put this keyword in here this many times, and the page title has to be this big on the page. Or, oh we can't have this graphic here. It has to be this type of graphic, and it has to have these words on it.
Usually that stuff is not nearly important as it was, say, a decade ago. You can have fantastic UX and fantastic SEO working together. In fact, they're almost always married.
If you're coming up with problems like these, please leave them in the comments. Reach out to me, tweet to me and let me know. I guarantee you almost all of them have a creative solution where the two can be brought together.
All right, gang, love to hear from you, and we will see you again next week for another edition of Whiteboard Friday. Take care."

Excellent WBF. I love the concept of "Paradox of choice" and so agree that "less is more." Oh, yes, I go crazy when they have a slew of social media sharing buttons. It really seems that user experience and SEO optimization are working more together hand in hand. I think site speed is another example of that.

Yes, and regarding the last point, opposition of UX vs. SEO, seems to me this is one of the over arching philosophies and goals of Google. I believe Google will continue to progress further so that good SEO (for their SE at least) aligns with good UX design. I sure would not invest long term against that premise.

Stock photos are my pet peeve.The absolute worst? All those gorgeous models with gleaming teeth who inexplicably work as headset-wearing customer service reps. Yet they are so happy that they smile from ear to ear. Amazing!

Great Whiteboard Friday Rand!User experience has always been a great thing in my opinion, my sites tend to be blogs or forums so having my community interact has always been hard! but when it happens, it's fantastic and tends to help my SEO rather then effect it, of course you'll get these fake users that bash their competitors with fake reviews on your site (though we're slightly going of topic here) but that's easily fixable if you have an email which is sent to your customer once their order or engagement is complete for them to review you etc..We use heatmaps at my agency, it's FANTASTIC to see user engagement, it lets us see a ridiculous amount of information and helps us pull things that have great engagement higher up on the page, or like-wise move things lower. It also allows us to see what content is hot and "whats not".
In terms of Social engagement buttons and such, I think having the options is great but I do hate it when companies have 10 different buttons which take up half the damn page!
Engagement via images, videos etc... I LOVE visuals, what's wrong with you Rand?? :P but I agree stock photo's are awful.. Hiring a "ok" Graphics guy or even asking a favor from a photoshop friend as I like to call them.. Can add a ton of push to your user, drawing their eyes to your content is what you want. Wikipedia does it perfectly, they have a great mix of images/graphics and text.
I have had people say that they want to optimize for SEO over the user engagement/experience, though I'm slightly confused by how they don't co-exist together? Look at infographics - A great UX tool and SEOs love them at the moment, look at videos a great SEO tool for the MASSIVE listing you get in Google with a video and the awesome engagement you get from users.
Anyways, I apologize for my HUGE comment.. but Great WBF Rand.. in fact 1 of my favorite!

Agree with a lot of what you and Rand are saying. I think all the different social buttons is a real issue. Can slow page loads, could be effected by changes to code at site you're sharing with etc. I wish this behaviour belonged in the browser it self like how Windows 8 and phones have native sharing. That would really improve UX in my opinion and make sites look better too!

One of the most simple yet overlooked facts when it comes to usability is some simple testing. Get some users to actually fill out the forms and see what kind of problems they run into. All too often, sites are focusing on SEO, pouring money into PPC and have silly problems with forms preventing conversions and meaning users are just giving up.

Seriously, I have a client who was spending several thousand pounds a month on PPC (amongst everything else they were doing) and the main conversion form enforced a phone number format of +441112223333 and in the UK, most folks are just going to enter something like 0121 222 333 or some such but this form did not allow spaces and required a full international style number - five people I put in front of that form could not fill it out and did not understand the form error message that just stated 'please enter a correct phone number' or some such.

The Steve Krug Dont Make me Think book is an old one but a good one as is the follow up Rocket Surgery Made Easy that focuses more on the testing side of things.

This does not have to be complex and in fact, should not be complex, things should just work and be painless and anything that requires overt thought or scares people off should be reconsidered.

Lose as many fields as possible, simplify, simplify, simplify - I only ever buy from amazon now as I have one click checkout - I pay more sometimes but faced with the simplicity of one click checkout versus some ghastly form and registration process - well, amazon, you got me there.

One of my biggest UX learning moments involved phone numbers, too.On an ecommerce site, my IT team wanted to capture phone numbers in two separate fields: 3-digit area code, then 7-digit number. After much haranguing we built an alternative form that captured the phone number in a single field. Conversion rates immediately jumped about 8%.Similar story with credit card numbers: eliminating the drop-down asking for card type (it's right there in the initial digit anyway) resulted in a 15% increase in conversion rate.What this taught me was to never take anything for granted. Just because EVERY ecommerce site (including Amazon!!) requires a cc type and a split phone number field doesn't mean it's the right way. Question everything, take nothing for granted, and most of all, stay humble.

I talked about how SEO & UX can work better together a few years ago at the IA Summit, and I got so interested in the topic that it eventually led me to enter graduate school and move out of SEO entirely.

So I would love to see this conversation continue! Do you think that Courtney could do a follow-up on actionable steps that UX strategists can take to work with SEOs? :)

Jonathan, Rand said that UX & SEO are married. So we do not consider that you have divorced SEO. You've just entered into a high level of relationship.LOVE this WBF and +1 for Courtney's actionable steps post!

I read a really great post this weekend on Rand's #2 point - social sharing buttons on the iA blog by Oliver Reichenstein

It's a great post on whether we need the buttons at all. That the buttons measure the posters social reach and not the value of the particular article. Plus it points out the the buttons can increase load time for pages. It's a great read.

I used to put share buttons in many of my wordpress blog. 99% plug in buttons (not updated) are slow loading, showing 2-6 errors in checking (w3c validation). If we calculate, the ratio of gain and loss, may possibility to get 1 or 2 likes, tweets and shares, but may loose 10 -15 possible visits due to page loading and errors, browser problems, device loading problems, (those may be organic or may be having chance of business conversion).

I like some quotes Oliver added from the twitter especially by @fariskaIt is really a eye opener towards the real truthWithout efforts nothing can gain"put effort to get good results, instead of relying on cheap magic tricks"

Real charm is hidden in these words.

I think Mr. Reichenstein has decided to write that article after seeing that tweet by @fariska

I totally agree, Rand, that UX and SEO are joined at the hip. Here;s my take on why:

I am an in-house SEO. The company that hired me is a small company, and hiring an in-house SEO was a major business decision for them. They made it very clear that they wanted my help getting better rankings and more traffic. I am not naive enough to think I can sit in my office and pat myself on the back if I only achieve those two things. I know that if I succeed in bringing in more traffic and improving rankings, but that doesn't result in a significant boost to the bottom line (revenue), then my job is in jeapordy. Consequently, if I'm moving the company up and driving hoards of visitors to the site, and when they get there they have a lousy experience and leave without purchasing, that deeply effects the end result of any SEO I did. I have to care and take and active role in making sure that good SEO is married up with a great UX, or else my work it pointless.

Thanks for also pointing out the myth of the "One Page Checkout" versus the multi-step checkout. I think this is something that could vary greatly from one site to the next and really needs to be tested on an case by case basis. I completely agree with namco's comment above - If you are using a multi-step process for forms, showing a progress bar is crucial.

I finally got a point for my firm to believe that Point 4 is a myth. I totally believe that while writing for products we should give the reader,a good content. If the content is great & useful, the reader will scroll.- Jatin Chhabra

A couple of things I want to add to your whiteboard friday:In point 1- if you are going for a multi step form layout, make sure that you make a progress bar to let the user know how far they are from the finish. I occasionally do surveys on YouGov and I hate it when they don't do it because I'm thinking:

When is this going to end??

And if people think that on your forms the chances are high that they'll just give up and leave!

In point 4 - if you have a site that does scroll and you have more than one goal, it's best to make sure that the primary goal is above the fold and the others are below the fold, for example a lead generation site that also has newsletter signups (yes, I know I'm using the newsletter example again, but it's one that I see done badly and repeated by sites over and over again).

I did find a really good example of a goal that was below the fold that asked for newsletter signups and provided value (over and above the usual offers that accompany newsletter forms) and the link is from blueglass seo (below). After the blog post is a yellow box that bulletpoints what they will give you and ask to sign up.

The better the UX is, the longer users will generally stay on the site, will visit more pages, less bounce rate, etc. Like you said, a decade ago I would have said otherwise, but with Panda and all the algorithm changes, that's no longer the case!

Hi Rand,I loved your post especially your thoughts in point two on too much choice. It is always apparent when working on a retail site, but I for one certainly forget about smaller sites having too much choice when it comes to the little things. Your point about social share buttons is so true and I have never thought to actually challenge why there are 6-8 methods of sharing on site, yet only 2 of them have any volume.In terms of point four - have you relied on any other more recent studies than the one you posted in this post?

I keep seeing people wheel out heatmaps on how users typically use a page but these are 3/4years old. I think we have become complacent at test and learn over the years and have held onto these myths - especially the notion of non-scrolling.

Awesome Whiteboard Friday Rand! With a background in Psychology, I work in SEO but have a passion for UX so completely understand where you are coming from about the two co-existing, particularly as we continue to seeing more UX come in to play, i.e. the growing importance of bounce rate and CTR. Expanding on the Paradox of Choice especially with regards to eCommerce sites, I think users are less inclined to come to decision about what to buy due to the risk of making the wrong choice. If less options are available, there is less chance you are going to regret the option you chose. Reducing the risk of regret, in turn decreases the users anxiety and increases the likelihood of them making a confident choice.I think as time moves forward we are going to see the lines between UX and SEO blur even more than they already do.

Personally, I tend to make decisions quicken when I am offered smaller number of options, so I agree with you. If you run eCommerce and have many products, you should consider implementing step-by-step filtering option, so user will end up with only few products that fit his needs.

Great info. I think there is a lot to the fact that people do better with less choices. Why else would landing pages be so successful. Also, if I had more apps closed on my computer, I could also get a lot more done.

Your video reminded me of how sometimes I feel slightly uncomfortable with the term SEO in general. The term seems to purely focus on pleasing the search engines while completely ignoring the human aspect of it---The user-experience. UX & SEO go hand-in-hand. A true "SEO optimized" website does a great job in pleasing both the bots & the humans.Great video Mr. Fishkin, Thank you for sharing it!

There are many positive benefits for breaking big forms into quickly loading simple forms.

1) It brings more page views2) There will be more chance for more registration of (fill ups, submissions)3) Positive energy connected to bounce rate4) It will bring more points connected with user activity

I love WBF! Rand, your point #5 is the crux of the topic in my opinion. Every change the search engines make point toward getting results that will be better for the users. Better UX equals better SEO!

I am starting to become of Fan of actually having all Inbound marketing and all UX bundled together into a group called Conversion marketing or something similar. The thing is we always talk about SEO and UX and worry about whether or not they can play well together. I know something that plays well with any field and that is "Making Money". So why not just say that doing x increases your number of conversions and then the only thing we would be focused on is increasing conversions and not whether or not that comes from UX, SEO, PPC, Social, etc. Focusing with the end in mind is more important than putting things in the hands of the experts in their fields. "When you are a Hammer everything looks like a Nail"

There are general rules about UX, but few universal truths. The important thing is to Always Be Testing, because your audience may respond differently to forms, social media buttons, etc than the audience of another site.

Great points, Rand. Pertaining to your final point; way too often clients/SEOs see things as black and white. It immediately reminded me of all the conversations I've had with clients about navigational text for new websites - "Should our menu, submenu, drop-downs, etc. be our keywords or should they be short and easy to understand?" "So-and-so said we need to include "Car" in every navigational link..."

I am doing work on Google Webmaster for more that 100 clients, like creating and submitting sitemap.xml and image-sitemap.xml for the clients. Instead of submission of sitemaps what else I can do in Google Webmaster for our clients??

Hi Rand... You give always new and awesome things every Friday :) I read all of your Articles Daily. I just want to know one thing from you... If some is doing spamming of my site. then how can safe my site from Spamming, I am not a pro member therefore I cannot do SEOMOZ Q & A... that's why i am asking this question here :( Thanks in Advance :)

Great advise Rand. Splitting up the form is such a great way to get users to take that step to filling up the form. One of our clients have had such good results after choosing to go down this road. If you have a long form I would recommend spliting it up

Great WBF Rand! We used to hear things like "SEO and design doesn't mix" and "SEO and UX doesn't mix". With a creative mind, proper planning, and knowing what you TRULY are saying on your page, these elements as you said are intertwined, almost inseparable. My guess is that sometimes people think they need keywords, titles, etc at the very top when that just isn't the case.

One instance I have seen that makes the 2 murky lately has to do with parallax scrolling sites and/or sites that scroll to content within the page. While the scrolling effects are cool, all of the content still is technically on one page. So if a company offered 2 or 3 different services, yet all of the content is on just that one page, you've got a creative 'pickle' on your hands. Just curious to see what your workaround for that would be.

I am caught in the Paradox of Choice and suddenly confronted with a singularity of a giant fish slowly emerging from a sink as I hide in a shed so I can be the elder twin. Seriously, the PoC is real and something we discuss constantly when developing new websites. I am helping to develop a large e commerce site and several of the things on the WB were topics of conversation. The examples conjured up images of filling out online profiles for employment. After a few just looking at all of the information you will have to fill out in order to continue makes me cringe.It is a fine line between providing too many choices or not enough, but that is when the SEO analytics come in to test and measure. If it is not working try something different there is not shortage of data points. Also, I believe that good SEO allows for a good UX. A site that is well organized and searchable will be more enjoyable for users.

Many web
developers forget about the website goals in the process of giving more
artistic looks. If your website isn’t looking too much vibrant and colorful but
provides better user experience, then you can also increase your conversion.

About 8 months ago, I started at my current job - an SEO at a software/web development agency. In addition to helping to start their digital marketing department, they already had an established and successful UX department. My first project/client was helping with a website redesign that focused heavily on UX, but they wanted to make sure that all UX elements were also SEO-friendly. To my surprise and delight, not only were the team really on-board with any suggestions and advice that I gave, but to be honest, a lot of our views aligned perfectly - their UX suggestions were already SEO-friendly, and if they were thinking of something that might not have been, they often pre-empted that that might've been the case.

It's funny because about 2-3 years ago, I worked at another company where UX and SEO didn't speak to each other. They worked independently, and I wouldn't be surprised if some implementations of the one did damage to the other. They probably undid each other's work, rather than working together and doing great things together.

The former/more recent example is where everything's headed - and for that, I'm glad. The two disciplines aren't independent - they're intertwined.

This article is awesome as it talks about the usability testing done on a site and how it affects SEO.The registration step is taken as example here which is more clear and interesting and the user mind set is clearly studied with these kind of myths and SEO ranking is decided based on SEO.To know more visit Technology Blog. This also talks about how blog comments is to be written and this also accounts from SEO prospective.

"alter your philosophy slightly to the three or four or if you want to be
a little religious about it, even the one social network or item that
you think is going to have the very most impact."

That is the attitude I have always taken. I want to encourage my audience to share AND make it easy for them, but I also want to make sure their actions provide the most benefit to me. Is having that random social network button there for the 1 person in a 1000 that wants it going to really make a difference? Probably not.

With us being an ecommerce website, if there's ever a conflict compromising UX for "too much" SEO, we always ask ourselves, "Which is the best approach to achieve the bottom line: sales?" Sure, we are on board to make sure that our keywords are in the right place and we have useful content, but when it gets down to little details in SEO resulting in big UX issues, focusing on the bottom line helps us keep it in focus.

Totally agree in the seeing the visitor journey more holistically. Many SEO folk try to get as much traffic to the website as possible without thinking of what the visitor will do when they get there. By understanding basic UX you start to think about the whole customer journey more and improve the whole visitor experience.

It should also be noted that Google likes great websites that engage visitors and it has lots of data constantly being transported back to the mothership.

So good to see UX & SEO being treated as areas which are intertwined - they are so influential upon each other in lots of ways. If you have a bad UX your bounce rate and interaction stats will be poor which is going to effect your rankings. If your SEO is bad but you've got great UX you're not making the most out of all the great stuff on your site because there is potential for so many more people to find it.

I'm a UX professional and agree wholeheartedly with the points you raise.

I have a question for you. As a designer, I sometimes encounter clients who ask us to "add more text" to a design "for SEO". They may agree that our design, based on user research meets the content needs of their users, but they fear the design does not allow enough space for population of SEO targeted keywords. Is that a dated SEO myth or should we compromise our user centred designs by adding text that offers no real value to users.

I strongly agree with you. A combination of great UX and SEO could produce the optimum results. This post is a real myth buster. Anyway, visual design is still critical so I would rather suggest having a balance technique. Thanks for sharing!

Does anyone else agree that Netflix has the "Paradox of Choice" issue? I spend more time looking for something to watch than I actually do watching anything. Just my nickels worth. UX will be on the forefront as the web evolves to be more human. Very important for SEO.

Last point it just happend with me few days back I suggested few keywords in sub headings but design lead removed those keywords on the name of great UX & UI of site. He said from these keywords & long sub headings site is looking ugly.

I have a question for you because you suggested that if any of us were unsure of effectively implementing this strategy than we should ask in the comments.

Well, I have been doing Web Design and SEO for 5 years now and have done very well with any of my SEO efforts from day one with being on the front page of GOOGLE for anything computer repair related in search since 2009. This is mostly attributed to the fact that I had 154 pages of well written content for my computer repair business however, what I have found since I started is that people those that are "specifically" searching for computer repair services are not interested in reading a Book or should I say a lot of content and they pretty much have no interest in learning either from what I can see over the past 5 years.

People are getting lazier and lazier and we can pretty much count on that trend to continue so my question is.. seeing how the SEO landscape has changed so drastically with Panda and Penguin, how do keep a minimalist approach to my content so as not to overwhelm the people (customers) who are already overwhelmed by the fact that their world has been turned upside down and they are in panic mode already because their computer is broken to whatever extent?

Seeing how GOOGLE is basically putting emphasis on content (which is fine) but there are numerous instances where writing long winded content is counter productive due to the current state of the prospects mindset (people with computer problems) so how can this situation be overcome?

I want to re brand my company and I am winding up for migrating from JOOMLA 1.5 to WordPress and my first hand research shows that in my industry too much content on any give service page is non conducive and deters people (go figure) and over loads them too much in their current state of crisis!

Here is my current business website (the first one I ever built) and I have done very well in search since 2009 but like I said I am looking to go with a huge reduction of content on every given service page which is what gets me the ranking so I am a tad confused because if I write a lot of content I make GOOGLE happy but i deter my prospective customers. http://www.communitycomputerrepair.com/

What would you consider the minimum amount of content these days that would keep the audiences attention (computer repair customers) and also make the Search Engines happy?

Awesome Whiteboard Friday Rand, I'd agree that it's a huge part of any SEO campaign and I'm enjoying trying to make the user experience as quality as possible. The first thing I recommend in an SEO campaign is working on the front end rather then the backend (meta data etc...)

Great Whiteboard Friday about a very important topic. Thank you.My contribution is on point #3, on the needed balance between good copy and good visuals, and I would add balancing them with clear focus on customer's goals as well.Nancy Duarte, on her book on presentations "Resonate", makes a clear explanation on why each part is important, and what role plays each. Let me quote her (page 100 of her book):"Aristotle claimed that to persuade, one must employ three types of argument: ethical appeal (ethos), emotional appeal (pathos), and logical appeal (logos). Facts alone are not sufficient to persuade. They need to be complemented with just the right balance of credibility and content that tugs at the heartstrings."Nancy Duarte accompanies it with a picture of a simple triangle. Clear and to the point, as the whole book (reccomended).My little contribution to this helpful WBF on UX myths and SEO is to think of a webpage as a presentation on a topic, and pairing logical appeal with our copy, emotional appeal with the visual elements, and the ethical appeal with the goals at hand (users' and business). When the page gets relevant to the visitor, SE's do their job on "psst-psst-user, watch this one"-ing it.

Working in-house, it's both a gift and a curse to be responsible for the full visitor journey. We get to make sure that our messaging and our promise/appeal to the user is carried throughout, but that also means that chance is slowed as multiple pieces have to come together. Regarding Rand's last point, the UX versus SEO battle is very familiar one for my team, but it really comes down to "who's taking ownership of the web" and the lack of a centralized content strategy.

Hello Mr. Rand FishkinI am a content analyst and I face a great difficulty combining UX with SEO for our projects. Thanks to you that I have been able to get a clear picture on how to combine the two for a great usability and ROI. I always look forward to White Board Fridays because of the excellent tips and explanations, and recent trends it gives on SEO.

Hi Guys,Looks like I am a little late to the party on this video but I have some relevant feedback for a retail client Little Black Dress (LBD) http://www.littleblackdress.co.uk/ that I have been working with over the past 6 months.Since the start of 2013 we have been heavily working on increasing the conversion rate on LBD and we have been looking into multi-step e-commerce conversions and we have found that stepping out the process is more successful. Conversion rates are increasing on a weekly basis and we are having less of a drop off rate.Another great Whiteboard Friday and I do agree that UX and SEO are part of the same process and you can just focus on one side. We often have the discussion about user journey Vs. bot journey in our digital team - you have to account for both or you risk alienating the other.

So true. We don't know what happens in Google algorithms but they are trying to filter good search results among useless sites. That's why they introduce many updates like Penguin and Panda but I have little doubt about some search results because they are not gaining quality links but ranking on top. Anyway Whiteboard Friday always give their best for us. Keep in touch with them.

Interesting point about long versus short forms. It seems to largely depend on user expectations. Best example of a long form: TurboTax. They walk users through a long series of short forms and effectively manage user expectations throughout the process. They also provide constant reminders about why you decided to fill out the form in the first place--to get a larger tax refund!

Why your short form isn't converting: you didn't state a clear reward for submitting information.

Why your long form isn't converting: you let the user forget about the reward.

Got a lot of this WBF this week Rand.I tend to employ much of what you discuss this week in our own customer stories.One thing I want to share with readers is the use of photography in your content. We get many comments on the stock images we use. People feel that we put real consideration into visually representing the clients work, using stock representative of their location or their topic/them of the story. For us to become known for this with our customers makes you feel your adding a richer element to your content.I've added some classic examples below that we have been given positive feedback from users. So if you can use it then go for it. Its not expensive, just give it some thought on what you are trying to communicate. A picture is worth a 1000 words!! - Very true saying.Note, one decent picture is all you need - don't litter it. + Panoramics are cool as wellOne other great thing - If you can't afford photostock then aks photographers, offer them a credit for usage - We're a company with health marketing funds but we still do this. Even try Flickr for instanceHealth Metrics and Evaluation (University of Washington, Seattle) - http://www.instantatlas.com/IHME_Story.xhtmlLondon Fire Brigade - http://www.instantatlas.com/LFB_Story.xhtmlAlaska Department of Health - http://www.instantatlas.com/informed-alaskans-story.xhtmlHavering Council, London - http://www.instantatlas.com/Havering_BC_Story.xhtmlExample of asking a photographer to let us use his work.Pinellas County, Florida - http://www.instantatlas.com/pinellas_story.xhtml

Great Whiteboard Friday Rand. The paradox of choice brings me back 5 years to my psychological classes, my favorite subject :) To be honest, I was waiting for such Whiteboard for long time to provide me back up :). I totally agree with all you said and I would also add on that these two, together with Analytics, create a great weapon for Online Marketing success. If everyone working on UX, SEO, Analytics, PPC and Social Media would have an holistic thinking, all these areas would flow so well together and results would be astonishing.

Outside the web dev and seo world, not many people have
heard of usability – certainly not UX or UI – and this void works against SEOs,
in my opinion. For example, when I have been asked to propose how a site’s SEO
can be improved, and the site is such a
wreck from a usability point of view that it’s crystal clear to me and the web
developer that the first step is a usability test, the client has pulled back
completely. This is particularly true of legacy sites, e.g. government sites
that have dozens of left navigation tabs.

The SEO industry has done (more than) a terrific job
promoting itself and the benefits of SEO, but the usability industry is rather
unknown by comparison. I hope to partner with a usability expert so that those
proposals will seamlessly incorporate usability and SEO. Clients will not
pursue usability testing, no matter how much I try to convince them that Google
has basically mandated putting the user experience above all else as the path to successful SEO.

I would like adding a commentary concerning the last point "Greath UX doesn't match with great SEO". I confirm this is absolutely wrong. In fact, in my company, the UX specialist is one of my best colleague because we have common goals and good (even often common) overview about web best practices

We do a small meeting every 2 weeks to share new methods, new analysis, news on projects we are working on (sometimes the communication inside a big company is not so hot) and we generally put together our expertise to the client.

Thus, we are stronger and we can complete each other when we are with the client.

If you work in company where UX is currentlty fighting with SEO, there may be a problem and one of them (maybe both) are not professionnal and don't see the common goal they should have together :).

In your first point about all option in one page instead of multi-step pages.. Now a days i noticed that in so many portal and websites having a long registration form on their profile.. But I noticed most of the website starting to use Facebook user id and password to register on particular website. This method can save time of user and once they login through their facebook user name and password they no need to remember addtional username and password and remaining field they can fill up later on. So i am sure through this method we can increase our registrations.

For me it depends on what the image is representing and how the underlying text is used to support this.For example I did something similar to a bed and breakfast where the selling point was the views around the venue. I wrote text to accompany and reinforce this (notice that I used you instead of we) whilst adding more pictures to support the surrounding area.The site is here:lakebirdslodge.co.uk

I think we all walk the line between good SEO and good UX. Writing title tags and meta descriptions would be much easier if only bots and spiders were going to read them but by keeping human readability the top priority, it makes the job more difficult.We have a client now in a niche where he is redefining how the industry works. Which is great and definitely sets him apart. But many of his keywords are targeted towards potential customers who would be searching for his competitors. Since he does not run his business the same way his counterparts do, we can't use many of those words and phrases on the site. At least not without putting some like "we are not like other ______ businesses!". But again, people can tell if these tags are spammy or written just for SEO so we have been very careful.

Rand, thanks for covering this topic. In regards to #4, we are considering the use of anchored links (links that skip people down to a specified area of the page) above the fold on product category pages to to help people quickly navigate to the specific content they are looking for, down at the bottom of the page. We figure this will not only allow us to show more products closer to the top of the page, but it will also get people the answers they need faster, so they don't have to skim over the entire page.What I'm wondering is whether or not anchored links could replace text at the top of the page, for SEO purposes. Our thinking was that if we provide the links at the top of the page to the specific areas of content down below, the bots will still navigate to the optimized text before all the products, and our users will find what they came for quicker. If you or anyone here has any thoughts or experience on how anchored links affect SEO, in terms of content ranking and bot crawl-ability, I would be grateful to hear it.-Michael

Awesome WF again, Rand. I think I'll be taking a few of these points to my designers. A lot of my clients would benefit from the multi-step form, instead of just a single page form. My solution so far, has been a single, simple form, but some clients want more info before they can qualify a lead. The multi-step form should help... also it will be better for tracking!

Regarding forms, some tools support the concept of progressive profiling, where forms can be dynamic and ask for minimum amount of information to complete a conversion, then on subsequent visits, forms that are user aware can ask users additional questions while omitting questions that have already been asked and answered on previous site visits. These techniques will not replace multi-step forms designed for single visit conversions but for some situations, can be valuable to build a more complete user profile while not asking the user to answer the same questions on subsequent visits. The technical solutions that I am aware of use cookies to track users across sessions. We have found progressive profiling to be especially valuable in B2B lead generation for larger solution sales where users come back to a site multiple times during the buying process.

We totally agree with the theory that SEO and UX go hand in hand, in fact we consider them to have a highly mutually beneficial relationship!As for the stock photos v basic text debate, neither is a worthy winner! There's simply no substitute for a combination of well formed text and original imaging! Thanks for a great WBF!

Good stuff! To me, it seems like UX and SEO are inseparable, not contradictory. It seems as though many people have forgotten (or never recognized) the importance of UX to SEO. The most basic things like navigation, usability and site speed are often overlooked in favor of jumping right into link building or even content development.

About a month ago, I wrote SEO Should Begin with "O" which I hope helps some people remember to think at least a little more about the user, and that good UX really is good SEO.

Dear Sir, randfishI have been Studying your Whiteboard Friday from a long time and continually Implementing it according to the needs but I have been facing problem in applying it in the News Websites if you can suggest anything For the Off-Page for those website.And also the 4 part of this topic the UX & relation between SEO still confuse about NEWS Websites. I will be very thank full to you.Regards,Ahmed Adnan

think the multi-step vs single step form/checkout argument is too simplified. 3 things required to make multi step work, otherwise a single form is better:1 - not too many steps. If you have like 10 steps, people get tired of progressing2 - if there is no way to "go back" & correct errors without losing the data, you will get a drop off in sales3 - site/progression speed. If loading each step takes forever, again people will lose interest & leavemany find one page/step works better for them, but this is usually going to be because the UX of multi step was poorly executed. Single forms are however easy to put together so on balance you are more likely to have better UX than with multi step

This is a great WBF. I actually wrote a blog post about 2 years ago that goes along with what you are saying. -> http://www.seobywebmechanix.com/why-seo-and-design-need-to-get-along/Websites perform at their full potential when SEO and UX/Design coexist and assist each other. You can have the most UX'd out site in the universe but if people aren't finding it then what good is it actually doing? On the other hand if your site gets millions of visits a day and your bounce rate and overall user interaction is poor than how effective is your website converting that traffic.Loved the article and it made me sign up for a SEOmoz account so I could write this comment. Keep up the great work you guys!

For example, images in a page or post directly impact the snippet created in the social sharing process which requires that an image be in on the source resource of the link shared in order for an images to show up in the link share on the social network.

Most images on a resources are automatically pulled in during the share process and the sharer can choose which image(assuming there are more than one) to use in the share. Sometimes I will use one image with share on Facebook and a different image of a share of the same link on Google+ to cater to different audiences needs/desires and drive engagement.

Images in a shared link on a social network can have a profound impact on the engagement, especially on visual networks such as Facebook, LinkedIn and Google+.

On the flip side, shared links with no images have been shown to drive far less engagement and therefore, I would assume that these posts get shared a lot less, especially by influencers who understand that shared links with images drive engagement and outperform shared links without images.

As a new blogger I guess I just assumed that UX and SEO were enemies at best, perhaps even mutually exclusive. In fact, I even told my legal peers that my posts were written for SEO, not for reading. This article has me rethinking that philosophy. Thanks for the info.

Great WBF thanks. Interesting point about the sharing buttons. If they are done neatly I'm less offended but a bunch of tatty looking unmatching share buttons is very offputting. I notice SEOmoz has only like, tweet and embed.Given the weight being placed on Google+, doesn't it make sense that the +1 button should be there?

100% agreed on everything except #3. If you get a pic from a good photo bank they are not all that crappy. You can get a great pic which will greatly match the contents of your article. I would say a copywriter need to have a feel of what pic is fine and what would look bad and generic for this particular article.Of course, I agree, that the best option would be having your own pics posted.I disagree that the wall of text is better than a wall of text + pic.

SEO and UX should work together. Now that being said, you can go for your great SEO practices for your website, but you need to keep on testing your UX till you trigger the right point. But need to ask one thing, is it better to showcase your multiple offers on a single page (especially in eCommerce website)? Will it confuse the user to concentrate on any one of them or it's fine?

Great WBF. One item that should be clarified is the stock photo stuff. Stock photos do suck eversomuch, but real photos can have an extremely positive impact, especially in ecommerce.

Online shopping is faceless which is why there's such a desire to put faces on an ecommerce site. When you add real pictures of people who work at the company, you are creating a visual and emotional connection which absolutely can increase trust (which then increases conversion). The mistake is using the same smiling picture that everyone else is using, not using pictures of people.

Great WBF. I've found that the multi-step form style in point #1 is the best. It fits better into the psychology of people who won't get turned off by a long form, better to feed them in small bites. Which also plays well into point #2 on social choices, just narrow it down to the best ones.

Love this Rand, no question that the farmer and cowman should be friends!

On point 2, one other thing that I commonly see is the order of social sharing buttons that doesn't seem to reflect the audience of a site.

Granted, I don't have access to the analytics of these sites, but it always seems weird when the Facebook like button is placed first beyond a more appropriate sites share, like a site where you commonly see 10 Facebook likes, then 300 retweets, 40 G+ likes and 50 LinkedIn likes.

It's always weird when that count average is commonly seen through most of the content, yet the order isn't reflective of which social sites are most relevant to the audience of that site.

I think SEOmoz has done a good job with social sharing order on blog posts, which makes me quite happy :)

Just viewing this post on an iPhone and trying to copy the embed code and it isn't letting me click in the box.. Anything you can do about using a different plugin to make iPhone readers/users have a better UX :P

Good stuff! To me, it seems like UX and SEO are inseparable, not contradictory. It seems as though many people have forgotten (or never recognized) the importance of UX to SEO. The most basic things like navigation, usability and site speed are often overlooked in favor of jumping right into link building or even content development.

About a month ago, I wrote web design + seo which I hope helps some people remember to think at least a little more about the user, and that good UX really is good SEO.

SEO and UX should work together. Now that being said, you can go for
your great SEO practices for your website, but you need to keep on
testing your UX till you trigger the right point. http://basecamptrekking.com/

Another very good WBF offering, Rand. I am always a fan of putting some type of visual on the page for consumers to see...all text can be hard to digest without having something else to keep their interest piqued.

I agree with Rand here, stock images are awful, and rarely contribute to your message. If you don't have a real visual, that actually adds to the value of the content, then you have to rely on your copy. Some goofy stock photo isn't going to make up for it. I believe when people see stock photos, cognitively or not, they distrust the content on the page. Marketing people can tell you why they distrust it, but I think your average Joe still subconsciously skeeves stock imagery. They know that attractive woman wearing a headset won't actually be the person answering their call.

The user experience is key! Rand, you brought up many issues on how to present the BEST user experience and one that stood out was by offering SO MANY options there is a potential that you will loose engagement! The UX and SEO need to coexists!

Rand said it perfectly - "The findability for a page is absolutely as critical as having great user experience"

For all points - since everyone has a custom/unique market, target, product, approach, funnel - you need to A/B test.Even if people are now used to scroll if you use fake footer effect they won't - ormost won't and you lose so A-B testing is crucial and you need to test for each step you take otherwise is like driving blind.. is like "i think there is a hard left ahead so let's brake left" type of approach :)Cheers !